Today's television viewer increasingly uses a digital video recorder (DVR) to record television programs and play programs back at a later time. Traditionally, the DVR resides at the subscriber's location and connects locally to a display device. More recently, cable television operators have introduced network storage options for recording cable programming on central hard drives, called network DVRs. Network DVRs are housed at and maintained by the cable operator's remote location.
It is desirable to minimize the amount of storage and processing power needed to support the network DVR functionality in the network storage environment. For example, rather than store individual copies of the same media for each user, it would be beneficial to store a single copy of an asset that can be provided to multiple users. However, making a single common copy of an asset for playback by a plurality of users is a potential copyright violation, i.e. copying and redistributing content, without proper asset rights, may be deemed to create a rebroadcasting environment that violates copyright laws. Should any two persons record the same program it must, for legal reasons, be recorded and stored as separate copies. Thus, individual copies are made for each subscriber.
Storing a unique copy of content for each user, however, drives up storage costs in an nDVR deployment. The cost factor is further aggravated with having to store multiple formats necessary to support multiple screens.
Proposed solutions for archiving to a common copy over time to recover storage space are hindered by up front storage costs that are still very high and a lack of security of access to the common copy. For example, at some later point, the individual copies are archived for storing only one common copy in the archive that is never broadcast. If a copy is needed after the archival, the copy is generated from the archived copy for each subscriber that requests it. Making multiple copies of the single archived copy, therefore, is similar to the common copy violation where the system does not securely bind the archive to the original requester(s).
Thus, alternate techniques for employing DVR functionality in the network storage environment are desirable.
It is noted that while the accompanying FIGS. serve to illustrate embodiments of concepts that include the claimed invention, and explain various principles and advantages of those embodiments, the concepts displayed are not necessary to understand all of the disclosed embodiments, as the details would be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.